About to undergo dramatic facial cosmetic surgery, one thought was in Barbara Naughton's mind: "I don't want to wake up from this."

She had paid s8,000 for a surgeon in Prague to straighten her nose, make her lips bigger and give her an eyebrow lift. Sadly, it was traumatic - as well as expensive.

It went wrong and needed several ops to correct it, too.

Looking back at that moment in 2007 Barbara realises now she really wanted to kill the part of her connected to her past - when she was repeatedly raped by her father.

"I wanted to leave some part of me behind, the part that had suffered all those years of abuse," she says.

"I wanted to be different. I was 28, an independent adult and I didn't want to carry those marks around with me for the rest of my life. But you can't just remove your past - whatever you do to the outside, the pain will always be inside."

Barbara was horrifically raped and abused by her own father from the age of eight.

Her father was a violent, sadistic drunk, who ruled his home through fear and beatings.

He terrified and tormented the young Barbara - once tying her treasured dog Blackie to the back of his car and driving away.

As she reached her teens, Barbara's life became even more unbearable as her father kept her under surveillance and threatened to kill her if she told anyone about him raping her.

Then when she was 18, her father nearly killed her after driving her to a deserted spot and trying to choke her.

As she began to lose consciousness, she vowed that if she lived, she would get justice against him.

Amazingly that night she was saved by a passer-by who knocked on the car window, asking for a light.

Justice was finally done in 2002 when Patrick Naughton, now 54, was convicted of 19 counts of rape and serious sex offences and sentenced to 11 years behind bars.

After being forced to keep her mouth shut for so long, Barbara was determined to bring her ordeal into the open, which she did by self-publishing her book: Daddy, Please

Don't! in her native Ireland. It has since been released in the UK under the title Without Hope and this week reached number four in the Sunday Times Bestseller list.

But even after extensive counselling and starting a new life in Dublin, Barbara couldn't escape the scars of her past - they confronted her every time she looked in the mirror.

"When I was 13 I was so depressed I tried to kill myself," she says.

"I threw myself down the hill on my bike, knowing I had no way of stopping. It left me with a permanent dent in my forehead and I didn't want to wake up seeing it every morning. I could not accept traces of things that snapped my mind back into childhood."

Barbara also had a deviated septum from a blow delivered by her father on a separate occasion. So three years ago she decided to have surgery at a clinic in Prague. "I didn't tell anybody what I was doing," she says.

"I didn't want anybody to talk me out of it and I felt that if I was in another country I could get it done without anyone knowing."

The surgeon suggested she have an eyebrow lift to correct the dent in her forehead, agreed to straighten her nose and gave her the option of a "permanent" lip enhancement.

"I'd only wanted some filler in my top lip," she says. "But he suggested a permanent solution where he removed some of the skin in my tummy and apply it to my lips to make them appear plumper.

"H e s e e m e d v e r y professional, very competent, so I agreed."

All three procedures were carried out at the same time. "I thought I'd wake up looking different," recalls Barbara.

"But I looked exactly the same - and the breathing problems I had before from my deviated septum were still there." The only noticeable difference in Barbara's appearance was that her natural smile had been replaced with a garish grin because she couldn't open her top lip wide enough when she tried to smile.

Barbara uses a mouthguard to stop her grinding her teeth at night and had to visit her dentist a while later when she developed problems.

"It was the first time another person had noticed there was something wrong with my mouth and I was horrified.

"Looking at myself, I could see a small line that went across my top lip when I smiled and constricted my mouth."

Then began a new nightmare for Barbara, who consulted a Harley street surgeon on the work done in Prague. "He was disgusted with what this surgeon had done," she explains. "He'd not corrected the nose because he'd just cut off the tip instead of altering the bridge.

"He said the lip line was appalling. And the dent in my forehead was still there.

"In fact I should never have had a brow-lift at 28 because I was so young, there was nothing to lift. The skin was still firm so the lift had no impact on the dent." Barbara returned to the surgeon in Prague last year and he agreed to give her the correct operation for her deviated septum and worked on her lip again. But still it didn't work.

Barbara has since been given filler injections in her lip to soften it and alleviate the constriction. Next month she will have a corrective operation in Harley Street to return her lip to normal. The whole experience, she says, has been a huge lesson. "I will always have that small mark on my forehead," she says. "And that's fine. It's not like anybody would notice.

"The fact is the whole cosmetic surgery was a waste of time, money and energy.

"I went to extraordinary lengths to erase things that were more on the inside than the outside. I would never have more surgery now. It's a very serious thing and I don't think I realised it back then. I thought I'd find an answer to my issues that way but I didn't. Just more pain."

Barbara says the root of her problem is an underlying insecurity about her looks, caused by years of emotional abuse from her father.

"I thought I was ugly for a long time," she says. "When you're eight and you're the one being abused, you ask yourself 'why me?'. After it began, I felt different from all the other children. I would sit on the stairs, looking at the kids playing in the street and feel so different. I was no longer a child - they were happy and I wasn't. And the reason? Because I was ugly."

It's taken a long time for Barbara to accept she wasn't to blame for what happened, and that she isn't ugly.

"If men used to compliment me I didn't believe them.

Being ugly stayed inside me. But now I accept myself a little bit more. It's hard because I'm fighting against everything I was told as a child but I am learning to accept myself."

Now, Barbara says she rarely talks about the abuse and tries to focus her life in positive directions and surrounds herself with positive people.

"Talking about the abuse is like empowering the dark side," she says. "And I don't entertain negative people."

She now works as a physical therapist, studies psychology, is writing her third book and producing her first album of songs. Music is her first love.

She hopes by sharing her experiences with others and showing how she overcame her own brutal childhood, she can inspire others trapped in abusive relationships.

"Anybody that finds themselves in an emotional or physical abusive situation, I'd like to say to them - recognise the signs, get out of it, get help," she says.

"You can't let them win - in the end, you must take control of your life, however hard that is."